Thick Copper PCB Demand Rises as Power Semiconductor Capacity Expands

On September 1, 2026, Hua Hong Semiconductor announced that the company and its wholly owned subsidiary Shanghai Hua Hong would join Wuxi Xihong Guoxin Phase II, Huaxin Dingxin and the State Development Corporation in a capital increase for Wuxi Hua Hong Phase III Semiconductor. The plan builds a 12 inch specialty process foundry line with monthly capacity of approximately 55,000 wafers. Total project investment is approximately 6.95 billion US dollars, and after the capital increase the target company’s registered capital will reach 4.17 billion US dollars, with Hua Hong and Shanghai Hua Hong contributing approximately 2.1267 billion US dollars in aggregate for a 51 percent interest. The added capacity strengthens the Wuxi base’s manufacturing position in specialty processes.

The significance for the PCB industry lies not in the wafer count but in what those wafers become.

Why Specialty Process Expansion Reaches the Board Level

Advanced logic processes primarily serve CPUs and GPUs. Specialty processes cover power devices, analog chips, power management, microcontrollers and a large volume of industrial and automotive components. Demand growth in those categories maps more directly onto the number of downstream electronic systems built.

When 12 inch specialty capacity expands, more power, control and analog devices enter automotive, energy storage, industrial control, robotics and AI infrastructure. As the interconnect carrier between chips and terminal systems, the PCB inherits a corresponding increment.

The transmission mechanism, however, is not simply more chips producing more boards. What changes is that higher device performance raises the structural requirements placed on the board. Increasing current density in power semiconductors requires thicker copper, lower conduction impedance and stronger heat removal. A growing population of high precision analog and control chips requires higher power integrity, signal integrity and noise control.

For PCB manufacturers, the meaning of wafer capacity expansion is therefore not only volume growth. It is a migration of product structure toward high reliability, high power and high density, which is a different manufacturing problem than serving the previous generation of boards.

From Interconnect to Electro-Thermal Co-Design

Power semiconductors are one of the specialty process categories that deserves the closest attention from the PCB industry.

Electric vehicle on-board chargers, DC-DC converters, battery management systems, energy storage power conversion systems, charging infrastructure, server power supplies and industrial inverters are all raising power density. That expands the use of heavy copper PCBs, high thermal conductivity materials and power module boards.

Conventional boards emphasize conductor continuity. Power electronics begins to require the board to carry current and manage heat simultaneously. Designs using 2 ounce, 4 ounce and heavier copper are entering power systems progressively, and multilayer heavy copper structures must address etch compensation, resin flow during lamination, barrel copper reliability and localized heat concentration.

Etch compensation deserves mention because it is where heavy copper diverges most from conventional processing. Thick copper etches laterally as well as vertically, so trace width changes during etching by a larger absolute amount than on thin copper. Compensating for that requires artwork adjusted to the process, and the compensation factor depends on the specific copper weight and etch chemistry. A design transferred from a thin copper process without recalculation will produce traces that are consistently off target.

AI server and data center power systems are replicating the same trend. As GPU power consumption rises, server mainboards and power modules must balance high speed signaling against high current delivery, and a single system may contain 16 to 78 layer boards with differential impedance control within plus or minus five percent alongside heavy copper power design. The value of advanced boards is expanding from layer count alone to simultaneous high speed and high power capability, which changes what a supplier must be able to hold within tolerance at the same time.

Automotive Electronics as a Dual Track

Intelligent vehicle electronic architecture is moving from many independent ECUs toward central computing and zone control. The execution layer still requires a large number of power devices, analog components and power management chips.

This produces a two track structure within the same vehicle platform. Central computing raises demand for high speed PCB with dense routing and controlled impedance. Power execution systems raise demand for heavy copper boards with current carrying capacity and thermal performance. Both tracks are required, and they have different manufacturing difficulty profiles.

Automotive qualification adds a further constraint that consumer work does not. A board must behave consistently across production batches over years, which means material control, plating consistency and process documentation matter as much as initial performance. Programs serving automotive customers need quality management systems capable of retaining lot level records through the full production period, because a question raised about a vehicle built three years earlier has to be answerable.

Robotics and Low Altitude Aircraft

Robots and low altitude aircraft share the automotive characteristic in a more demanding form.

Robot controllers, servo drives, motor modules, vision systems and sensors require both significant compute capability and a large number of analog and power devices. Electric aircraft and drones pursue light weight, high power density and reliable connection simultaneously, which expands the application space for HDI, any-layer structures, rigid-flex boards and flexible circuits.

In these products, the physical constraints drive the design more than the electrical specification does. A joint controller board must fit inside an actuator housing, and a flight control module must meet a weight budget. Those constraints push designers toward higher copper for power paths, flexible interconnect to cross moving joints, and denser HDI for the compute section, all within one assembly. This is where PCB fabrication spanning multiple board categories becomes more useful than deep specialization in one.

Semiconductor equipment and advanced manufacturing form a third adjacent market. Wafer capacity expansion itself increases equipment demand, and testers, probers, industrial control systems, power supplies and automated production lines all require high reliability control boards, test boards and high speed interface boards. As equipment precision rises, mSAP line widths at 0.075 mm and below, high density HDI and high reliability assembly capability gain more application opportunities.

Multi-Process Stacking Becomes the Norm

If AI servers drove the upgrade toward high layer counts and high speed materials, power semiconductors and specialty analog chips are filling in the other path: high power, high reliability and precision control.

Complex electronic systems in the near term are likely to contain high layer count boards, HDI and any-layer structures, mSAP fine lines, rigid-flex construction, heavy copper structures and high speed differential networks simultaneously. The manufacturing difficulty no longer comes from any single parameter. It comes from yield control when several processes appear on the same board.

The conflict is concrete. High speed signal layers require strict impedance and dielectric thickness control, while power layers require additional copper. Both affect total board thickness, lamination behavior and thermal distribution. Increasing copper on a power layer changes the dielectric spacing that the high speed layer above it depends on, so the stackup has to be solved as a system rather than layer by layer.

This also pushes manufacturing from board fabrication into SMT and full assembly. As chip packages become denser, BGA, QFN and power devices appear on the same board, which raises the importance of process inspection including solder paste inspection, automated optical inspection and X-ray. A closed loop from PCB through SMT PCB assembly is becoming a practical requirement for shortening development and validation cycles, because a defect detected at functional test can be traced to the fabrication or assembly step that produced it rather than inferred.

Capability matching these requirements includes heavy copper power design, high layer count HDI and rigid-flex manufacturing, mSAP line widths around 0.075 mm and differential impedance control within plus or minus five percent, combined with design for manufacturability review. For automotive, industrial control, AI hardware and power electronics development, that base supports the complex board level requirements that these programs present. Supporting industrial PCBA assembly alongside PCB manufacturing under one quality system, with incoming material inspection through X-ray closing the loop, covers the engineering requirements from prototype validation through small batch introduction.

Chip Localization and Supply Chain Coordination

What is genuinely notable about the Hua Hong expansion is not that one wafer fab adds 55,000 wafers per month of capacity. It is that the domestic electronics manufacturing chain is developing stronger vertical coordination.

Upstream wafer manufacturing addresses chip supply. Midstream PCB and PCBA manufacturing handles system level interconnect. Downstream automotive, AI server, robotics, energy storage and industrial equipment companies provide scale application. When domestic chip supply capability strengthens, downstream hardware companies gain more predictable development cycles and supply chain stability, which in turn improves the opportunity for domestic PCB manufacturers to enter new programs.

From an industry perspective, semiconductor capacity expansion and PCB upgrading are becoming difficult to analyze separately. Advanced logic drives high speed and high density. Specialty processes drive power and high reliability. Terminal intelligence converges both paths onto the same board.

The next stage of PCB industry growth will therefore come not only from more electronic devices being built, but from each board carrying more compute, more power and more system complexity than the board it replaces. Manufacturers positioned to serve that combination, rather than optimizing along one axis, will capture the larger share of the value as this cycle develops.